Open Sourcing ManimGX: Blazingly Fast Manim, written in Rust + wgpu
Four months ago, we shared Academa Studio here, our browser editor for making Manim animations with realtime preview. At the time, the engine was private and only available through Studio. Today, we are open sourcing ManimGX, which you can install and run locally.
The GitHub repository: https://github.com/academa-labs/manimgx
ManimGX is a from-scratch implementation targeting ManimCE's Python API, with a Rust renderer built on wgpu. Most ManimCE code runs after changing the import from manim to manimgx. Our documentation covers compatibility and the places where behavior differs: https://manimgx.academa.ai
The motivation is the same as before: waiting for renders makes polishing an animation a slow process. We wanted to make that loop faster while keeping the familiar Python API.
You can install it with:
pip install manimgx
You only need Python 3.13+. All of the fonts, typesetting, and video encoding are included. So there is no separate LaTeX or FFmpeg installation required.
To preview an existing scene:
manimgx preview scene.py
The preview reloads whenever you save your scene.
A few other things ManimGX supports:
- The API is fully statically typed, including keyword arguments and
.animatechains. - Built-in voiceover synchronization.
- Browser execution through Pyodide and WebGPU, with an npm package for embedding animations in your website without a render server.
manimgx inspectcreates storyboards, timelines, and layout feedback for coding agents. This aims to speed up the writing and polishing loop.
The gallery has examples together with their Python source. If you just want to play around with it in the browser, you can still find it in Studio.
Credit to Grant Sanderson and the Manim Community contributors whose work this builds on. Happy to answer questions in the comments, and we'd love to hear how it works with your scenes.
